Editors' Review

Avast Professional Edition skillfully scans your PC and several programs for viruses, although configuring it is not for the faint of heart.

Immediately after installation, the program asks if you want to schedule an antivirus scan of your local hard drives at system start. You'll notice two icons in your system tray after installing Avast: one to configure the functions and another to activate the virus recovery database.

Well-designed, Avast scans executables, inbound and outbound e-mails, and P2P programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, and Morpheus. Instant messages received from several messenger programs are inspected for harmful viruses as well. The program was able to block URLs and common file operations such as renaming and deleting. We appreciated the sensitivity adjusters to get protection to desired levels including normal, high, or customized.

We must say this application did slow down our system while surfing and using other programs. Many of its configurations require intermediate know-how or better. Fortunately, it has a generous 60-day trial. Don't let the steep learning curve turn you off; Avast safeguards your system at optimum levels.

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Publisher's Description

Avast 4 Professional Edition is a complete ICSA & Checkmark certified antivirus, Checkmark certified anti-spyware & anti-rootkit software package for corporate and advanced home use. avast Professional Edition includes an on demand scanner with two user interfaces, a skinnable simple interface: just select what you want to scan and in which way and press the play button, an enhanced user interface: Outlook like UI allows users to set any feature of Avast, prepare and run tasks, store and check task results, on access scanner: special providers to protect: most available e-mail clients, instant messaging: ICQ or Miranda, network traffic: lightweight firewall, P2P protection for Kazaa, BitTorrent, Web shield: all HTTP traffic, script blocker. avast Professional Edition is available in 32 languages. Small, true incremental, updates are downloaded and installed automatically.

Version 4.8.1169 adds improvements to the antirootkit engine.

What's new in this version:

Version 4.8.1169 includes strong self-protection, to prevent malware from turning avast protection off.

I have been trying 5 different free Anti-virus programs in the past week. Avira, Avast!, AVG, BitDefender free edition, and PC Tools Anti-virus. By far, out of those 5 Avast was my least favorite. Upon installing it, it started to automatically search for viruses and completely froze up my computer. I then had to restart. It is incredibly slow and the interface is absolutely horrible. I advise you try out Avira anti-virus. It's my favorite so far.

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